


Half the Sky

by Thalius



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Mutual Pining, One Shot, stranded on a random planet with nothing to do but ignore the elephant in the room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:14:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24241897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thalius/pseuds/Thalius
Summary: They both hold up a piece of it for each other.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Satine Kryze
Comments: 39
Kudos: 270





	Half the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> im working my way through clone wars and im incredibly emo about everything but especially obitine. this is set very ambiguously at some point after short Mandalore arc in S2.

For hours now she’d watched his arms tremble, each finger locked around the air in rigid concentration. There was a permanent furrow in his brow from the strain, and only occasionally did he have the strength to open his eyes and look at her.

Satine held in a cough. A film of dust coated the inside of her mouth no matter how much she heaved or spat, only made worse each time the enormous slab of shorn bulkhead shifted above them.

Instead she watched him, knelt in the centre of their little pocket of wreckage, his upraised hands the only thing keeping them from being crushed to death. It would be silly to ask Obi how he was doing; all she had to do was look at his face. But she ached to speak with him, to fill the silence with more than just the creaking of shifting steel and the clatter of debris. This was, strangely, the longest time she’d spent alone with him in years. She would have laughed aloud at the thought if it weren’t such a distraction.

Obi groaned and the slab above them shifted again. It was only a few degrees to the left, but it was enough to blot out what little light was cast by the fires still burning above. It was so dark now that she could not even see her own hands in front of her.

“Satine,” he croaked, the first time he’d spoken in a while. She crouched and made her way towards him, feeling across the splintered ground until she sensed him close by. The air around him seemed to shiver, and she could not tell if that was from the Force or from something else, something deeper and more intimate inside her that assured her she would find his body no matter the distance.

“Food?” she whispered, shaking off the fanciful thoughts and reaching for the satchel by her side, but he gave a grunt that she understood as disagreement.

“My nose—”

She nearly smiled. “Your nose?”

“It’s maddeningly itchy,” he replied, too exhausted to match the humour in her voice. 

She laughed enough for them both, feeling around again until her hand brushed up against his knee. His pant leg was damp with sweat, gritty from dust.

“My face is up here,” he whispered. Perhaps he was not too exhausted for jokes after all.

“Just getting my bearings.” She felt upwards, fingers finding the stiff leather of his belt, the supple fabric of his cloak, the cold steel of his collar plate. Eventually she found his cheek.

An explosive breath of relief blew on her wrist as she ran her fingernails along the bridge of his nose. She wiped away the dirt on his skin, too, using it as an excuse to keep touching him.

“Thank you,” he replied, his head ducking down. She caught it with a hand, her palm pressing against the springy hair of his beard.

“How are you holding up?” she asked, and her mouth curved into a proper smile when she felt him lean into her touch.

“Well,” he drawled between laboured breaths, “we haven’t been crushed to death yet.”

She considered responding with a joke, then thought better of it. “Do you need anything?” she asked instead.

She felt his head shake into her palm, and knew that their brief conversation was already over. With considerable reluctance, she withdrew her hand and sat down in front of him, careful not to have any part of them touching. It would be too great a distraction, and not just for him. 

With little else to do, she pulled up her communicator and looked down at the timestamp from her last message. It had been to Anakin, five hours and twenty-seven minutes ago. It told her no new information except for how much time had passed, but it still felt like a victory. They had survived this long.

* * *

She must have fallen asleep, because she jerked awake to the sound of coughing. The bulkhead slab overhead must have shifted again, because light flicked in the far corner now, enough for her to see around the small crevice they were stuck in. And enough to see Obi.

His head was bowed, hands still raised above him, holding up the sky. His fingers had clenched nearly to fists now, the material of his gloves straining against his knuckles. When he coughed, it rattled deep in his chest, wet and full of pain.

“Obi?” She reached for the cantine and knelt in front of him, tapping his cheek to get his attention. “You must drink.”

“I’m—” Another brutal coughing fit interrupted whatever he was about to say. He settled on a nod instead, and she tilted his chin up for him to drink from the bottle. It was metallic and warm, she knew, and would not help with all the dust in the air. The thought of fresh spring water was almost enough to bring her to tears.

When his head jerked away with a sputter, she let the bottle fall away from his mouth, corking it with a thumb. He coughed again, but she heard the relief in it this time.

“Speak to me,” he rasped, looking at her. His eyes were crinkled with the ghost of a smile. “I’m falling asleep.”

“I thought my voice was too distracting,” she replied, smiling as she sat across from him. She so badly wanted to touch his knee, to embrace him. Perhaps even worse still, she would like to kiss the exhaustion from his face. It would surely bring down the world around them, and only a terribly small part of her regretted such an outcome.

Still, she kept her hands to herself. There would be time later. There was always time for later.

“It is,” he agreed, bringing her out of her thoughts, “but I won’t squander the chance to listen to it by losing consciousness.”

“I like you when you’re complimentary.” She looked around their small prison, trying to find an object of conversation that was neither too grim nor too serious. It was more difficult than his own task. 

Eventually she settled on the familiar—a barb. “I have to say I’m surprised,” she told him.

He arched a brow. It made the dirt on his forehead crease; it made him look old. “About what?”

“You told me in confidence that your padawan was the one with the proclivity for crashing ships, not you,” she replied dryly.

“Former padawan,” he clarified, just as dryly. “Anakin is a pattern; I’m the exception to it.”

“Ah, but he did learn it from you.”

He rolled his eyes, no doubt a tremendous effort for someone so burdened. “He learned a great many things from me. Punctuality is hopefully an enduring one.”

Recognising the question in his words, she pulled up the communicator again. “They should be here soon,” she assured him. “It’s been several hours.”

“Has it?” He huffed, but it wasn’t a laugh. 

They fell silent, and far too quickly. Satine closed her eyes, searching herself. There was no shortage of things she wished to say to him; both of great import and of no consequence. Too often, when she found herself unable to sleep at night, her thoughts would fill with things she wished she could say. And now that she was in front of him, with far too much time on both of their hands, she was coming up empty.

“Would you like to play I, Spy?” she finally asked, wincing even as the words left her mouth.

A hoarse chuckle was his answer. “I was thinking….” He paused to draw in a breath, slightly shifting his position on the ground with a pained grunt. “Of a more-one sided conversation.”

Satine looked down at the hands in her lap, searching for answers there. “I can speak to you of home,” she whispered.

“Yours? Or mine?”

“I cannot bear the answer to that question,” she murmured. She could not look at him, though she could feel his eyes on the crown of her head. “But I will tell you of Mandalore. It’s changed since you were last there.”

* * *

His left leg was entirely numb, and his right was not far behind. He needed to shift his weight, but he didn’t trust himself to keep steady. Not after nearly nine hours of this. 

It was almost more difficult to keep his eyes open than it was to hold up the slab, but he managed both, and was rewarded with the sight of Satine sitting cross-legged a few feet from him, putting a plait in her hair. He was unused to seeing it fall around her shoulders like it did now. 

If he concentrated he could hear the wreckage burning around them. Their only saving grace was their lack of height; the fires from the crash were far enough above them that they weren’t consuming the oxygen in their little pocket of the wreckage. It also meant that any rescue attempt would be that much more difficult.

He must have made some sort of noise, because Satine looked up, her hands stilling on the small braid. Her mouth pulled up into a smile, her eyes full of sympathy. 

“How are you doing?” she asked, her voice a whisper. 

He swallowed. “I’m tired,” is the answer he settled on, and it got a short laugh from her. “How… how close are they?”

She pulled out her communicator and frowned at the screen. “Close,” she said after a moment, trying to hide the uncertainty in her voice. “They must have left hyperspace by now. It should be soon.”

The small fob beside him on the ground continued to blink. The rhythmic flash of red was entrancing, and it was all that kept his arms above him. Anakin knew where they were, and he was coming. Obi-Wan promised himself he would be more forgiving of his former padawan’s tenacity from now on. 

“I will—” He closed his eyes and shuddered as the bulkhead groaned and creaked above them. He adjusted the position of his fingers, trying to keep the pressure across the slab even. The eastern edge of it was much heavier than the rest of the slab, and he had to keep it from toppling forward and bringing the entire ship down the mountain with it.

“Obi?”

“I will pass out when they arrive,” he told her, refocusing. “Don’t be alarmed.”

“‘Don’t be alarmed’,” she echoed, doing a startlingly good impression of his voice. “As if I’m not familiar with how our missions tend to conclude.”

“Not always,” he protested, but he was too tired to smile. “There was Concordia.”

She hummed low in her throat—not disagreeing, but making it clear that there was still more to this discussion. Instead he heard her shift closer, and realised that he’d closed his eyes again. With considerable difficulty, he opened them to watch her.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked, her hand hovering near his chest. It never made contact with his robes, a small mercy that made him ache.

“Just keep talking,” he murmured, feeling his eyelids slip closed again. 

“Do not fall asleep,” she ordered, and the soldier in him stiffened at the steel in her voice, even if he didn’t have the strength to straighten his spine. “I will never forgive you if our last hours were spent without being able to kiss you even once.”

He laughed weakly, and felt her fingers at his chin, tugging his head up. “If you’d kissed me,” he told her slowly, “we’d have been crushed long ago.”

There was mischief in her expression; it reminded him of his youth. “There is still time, though.”

He flinched at the sudden pounding of his own heart, trying desperately not to lose focus. “Satine—”

She rolled her eyes and thankfully, regrettably, did not lean forward to kiss him. She also did not remove her hand from his jaw, and he wasn’t about to ask for it back. “My restraint is stronger than that, General.”

“I’m glad,” he replied, closing his eyes once more and letting her bear the burden of holding his head up. “Because mine is not.”

* * *

It was another hour and forty-four minutes before he heard Anakin’s voice calling out for them. It was yet again another eighteen before he felt the bulkhead shift under the strength of someone other than himself.

“Master!” Ahsoka’s voice this time, full of energy and concern, came from above. “Are you alright?”

He blinked awake. What little light there was flickered an angry orange, and in it he found Satine next to him. He hoped she saw the request in his eyes; he was too weak to speak.

The Duchess raised her face, cupping her hands around her mouth, and spoke with more volume and strength than he ever could. “We’re here! Do you have the bulkhead?” she called up to them, her voice booming.

It was Anakin who replied—and for once, he did not bark back with a ridiculous question of his own. “Yes!”

Obi-Wan let out a sob as his arms fell to his sides, his veins pounding in agony as blood rushed into them. The sky did not come crashing down. 

He toppled forward, a marionette with no strings, and was met with the firm grip of the Duchess, keeping him from falling directly onto his face. The steel above them rumbled, throwing more dust and debris down with it.

“Obi,” she whispered, only for him to hear, and held him firmly against her chest, shielding them both. He could not hold her; he barely mustered the strength to breathe. Instead he found solace in the warm strength of her shoulder, shaking with relief and trying not to openly weep with it. Her fingers twined up in his hair as light poured down from above, the creaking rend of steel falling away to reveal the open sky above them. The sun and the stars. Most importantly, Anakin and Ahsoka. 

“You did it,” Satine told him with a small laugh, her fingers on his cheek. 

“We both did,” he managed to tell her back. He was too exhausted to remember that he and Satine weren’t supposed to be touching.


End file.
